How to Read a Paragraph: The Art of Close Reading

How to Read a Paragraph introduces the importance of purposeful skilled reading and lays out methods by which to develop close reading skills using the tools of critical thinking. Developing these skills enables students to read for deep understanding, to properly analyze and assess what they read, and to reason within the logic of an author. As readers engage with the thinking of authors and uncover their assumptions and motivations, they glean the most useful information from their written work.

This book pairs with How to Write a Paragraph to offer an in-depth introduction to effective reading and writing skills. Activities in the book help sharpen reading comprehension skills for an elevated level of self-understanding, fulfillment, and depth of vision.

As part of the Thinker’s Guide Library, this book advances the mission of the Foundation for Critical Thinking to promote fairminded critical societies through cultivating essential intellectual abilities and virtues across every field of study across world.

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How to Read a Paragraph: The Art of Close Reading

Additional Information About: How to Read a Paragraph: The Art of Close Reading

Skilled readers do not read blindly, but purposely. They have an agenda, goal, or objective. Their purpose, together with the nature of what they are reading, determines how they read. They read in different ways in different situations for different purposes. Of course, reading has a nearly universal purpose: to figure out what an author has to say on a given subject.

How you read should be determined in part by what you read. Reflective readers read a textbook, for example, using a different mindset than they use when reading an article in a newspaper. Furthermore, reflective readers read a textbook in biology differently from the way they read a textbook in history.

The reflective mind improves its thinking by reflectively thinking about it. Likewise, it improves its reading by reflectively thinking about how it is reading. It moves back and forth between the cognitive (thinking) and the metacognitive (thinking about thinking). It moves forward a bit, then loops back upon itself to check on its own operations. It checks its tracks. It makes good its ground. It rises above itself and exercises oversight on itself.

One of the most important abilities that a thinker can have is the ability to monitor and assess his or her own thinking while processing the thinking of others. In reading, the reflective mind monitors how it is reading while it is reading. The foundation for this ability is knowledge of how the mind functions when reading well.

Having recognized this, we should also recognize that there are core reading tools and skills for reading any substantive text. These tools and skills are the focus of this guide.

Contents include:

Theory

The Premise of This Guide

Reading for a Purpose

Considering the Author’s Purpose

Developing a “Map” of Knowledge

Avoiding Impressionistic Reading and Writing

Reading Reflectively

Student Generated Map of Knowledge

Faculty Generated Map of Knowledge

Thinking About Reading While Reading

Engaging a Text

Books Are Teachers

Reading Minds

The Work of Reading

Five Levels of Close Reading

Structural Reading

How to Read a Sentence

How to Read a Paragraph

How to Read a Textbook

How to Read a Newspaper

How to Read an Editorial

Taking Ownership (Mark it Up)

Reading to Learn

Reading to Understand Systems of Thought

Reading Within Disciplines

The Art of Close Reading

Practice Exercises in Close Reading

The Declaration of Independence by Thomas Jefferson et. al.

Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau

The Nineteenth-Century American by Henry Steele Commager

The Art of Loving by Erich Fromm

Corn-Pone Opinions by Mark Twain

The Revolt of the Masses by Jose Ortega y Gasset

The True Believer by Eric Hoffer

The Idea of Education by John Henry Newman

AppendicesA. Sample ParaphrasesB. Analyzing the Logic of an Article, Essay, or ChapterC. Analyzing the Logic of a TextbookD. The Logic of Ecology